Heather Smith | Gristhttps://grist.org
A planet that doesn’t burn, a future that doesn’t suckThu, 22 Feb 2018 05:07:12 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/330e84b0272aae748d059cd70e3f8f8d?s=96&d=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.wp.com%2Fi%2Fbuttonw-com.pngHeather Smith | Gristhttps://grist.org
Drought doesn’t just mean less water — it also means more pollution.https://grist.org/briefly/drought-doesnt-just-mean-less-water-it-also-means-more-pollution/
Thu, 05 Jan 2017 00:42:17 +0000http://grist.org/?post_type=news-brief&p=359632That’s the conclusion of a new study of the recent drought in California, published in the journal Sustainable Cities and Society.

At the height of the drought, between 2011 and 2014, electricity produced via hydropower dropped by more than 60 percent, going from 21.2 percent of the state’s supply to 8.3 percent. Natural gas — more polluting and more expensive than hydropower — made up the difference.

It could have been worse. The drought coincided with a rise in solar and wind in the state. Without these new clean energy sources, CO2 emissions during the drought would have increased by 44 percent, researchers found.

]]>sun city los angelesFord is revving up its plans for electric and driverless vehicles.https://grist.org/briefly/ford-is-revving-up-its-plans-for-electric-and-driverless-vehicles/
Wed, 04 Jan 2017 05:31:16 +0000http://grist.org/?post_type=news-brief&p=359591Even as the automaker announced that was canceling plans to build a $1.6 billion factory in Mexico, it said it would invest $700 million in an existing Ford factory in Michigan to manufacture cleaner and more advanced cars. The Mexican plant had been intended to build small cars, and people just aren’t buying those these days.

There was no negotiation with President-elect Donald Trump over the proposed Mexican plant, said Ford CEO Mark Fields; it would have been scrapped no matter who won the election, he claimed. Still, Fields said Ford was “encouraged” by “pro-growth” “tax and regulatory reforms” that Republicans have proposed.

Among Ford’s planned vehicles: a hybrid Mustang, a hybrid F-150 pickup that doubles as a mobile generator, and a battery-powered SUV with a 300-mile driving range, all to be in production by 2020. Ford also plans to manufacture a fully autonomous hybrid vehicle without a steering wheel or a brake pedal by 2021, for marketing to taxi companies.

]]>mark-fields_sv2_7651Costa Rica got 98 percent of its electricity from renewables in 2016.https://grist.org/briefly/costa-rica-got-98-percent-of-its-electricity-from-renewables-in-2016/
Tue, 03 Jan 2017 23:34:39 +0000http://grist.org/?post_type=news-brief&p=359539Or so says the Costa Rican Electricity Institute. That’s not a fluke — the country generated 99 percent of its electricity from renewable sources the year before. 2017 is projected to be even better, thanks to four new wind farms and a good rain forecast.

Frequent Grist readers know that Costa Rica is the poster child for sustainable economic development — providing citizens with electricity, literacy, and universal health care without wrecking the environment.

That hydropower means the country’s electricity system isn’t as green as it sounds. Dams disrupt ecosystems, displace people, and send methane into the atmosphere. And while Costa Rica’s grid is almost completely renewable, 70 percent of the country’s energy still comes from oil, which powers its transportation systems.

When it comes to having your cake and not wrecking the troposphere, Costa Rica is light years ahead of most of the world. But it still has a ways to go.

]]>costa-rican-dam-reuters-cHere are the best nerdy infographics of the year.https://grist.org/briefly/here-are-the-best-nerdy-infographics-of-the-year/
Fri, 30 Dec 2016 23:27:03 +0000http://grist.org/?post_type=news-brief&p=359447The most epic was inventor Saul Griffith’s opus-in-the-form-of-a-website, Energy Literacy, which went from being an energy blog to a single, enormous infographic that aims to show precisely where energy comes from and where it goes. The site is overwhelming — you’d need a computer screen the size of a billboard to view some data sets easily — but it’s still fun.
Energy Literacy

This series of maps by the Washington Post shows the nerves and tangles of American infrastructure — everything from electrical grids to railroad lines. The country’s oil and gas pipelines are laid out below, prettier in map form than on the ground.

]]>screen-shot-2016-12-30-at-12-14-11-amscreen-shot-2016-12-30-at-12-14-11-amscreen-shot-2016-12-30-at-1-42-05-pm2016-pipeline-map-washington-postscreen-shot-2016-12-30-at-3-07-24-pm2016 was a great year for wind and solar, even if nobody noticed.https://grist.org/briefly/2016-was-a-great-year-for-wind-and-solar-even-if-nobody-noticed/
Fri, 30 Dec 2016 21:55:35 +0000http://grist.org/?post_type=news-brief&p=359426Renewable energy’s gains this year were incremental and unglamorous, so they had a hard time competing with this:
LAFD

But even if the media didn’t give clean energy a lot of attention, the progress was notable.

]]>solar-wind-shutterstocklafd-dumpster-firesolar-installations-gtmscreen-shot-2016-12-30-at-11-16-01-amcost-of-energy-world-averageIt’s been an excellent year for one thing: climate doom infographics.https://grist.org/briefly/its-been-an-excellent-year-for-one-thing-climate-doom-infographics/
Thu, 29 Dec 2016 20:17:09 +0000http://grist.org/?post_type=news-brief&p=359312I’m not sure whether that’s because there’s an infographic Renaissance happening across this great land, or because climate change has become so alarming that graphs are extra dramatic.

It shows effects both subtle (the drop in temperature in the 1880s, partly due to the eruption of Krakatoa) and dramatic (the accelerated rise in the 1990s, back when I thought the biggest problems in the world were that music sucked and grownups were jerks).

Aesthetically, though,I’m partial to this doom graph by Joshua Stevens of NASA, which shows how much hotter our Augusts have gotten over the last century or so. The My Little Pony–style color scheme is particularly inspired.

But my favorite is this infographic by Randall Munroe of xkcd, which goes all the way back to the last ice age. This is just a screenshot of the very beginning — you’ll want to click through to get the full goods.

If you like seeing atmospheric peril rendered in interesting and attractive ways, keep an eye on Hawkins, who not only makes good climate graphs, but spots other good ones before anyone else.

]]>A timeline of earth's average temperatureEd Hawkins Climate GIFtempanoms_gis_august2016xkcd-earth-temperature-screenshotTrump hates wind turbines even more than he hates women he deems unattractive.https://grist.org/briefly/trump-hates-wind-turbines-even-more-than-he-hates-women-he-deems-unattractive/
Wed, 21 Dec 2016 21:39:09 +0000http://grist.org/?post_type=news-brief&p=358724Or so a new cache of letters reveals. Earlier this year, Alex Salmond, who was Scottish First Minister from 2007 to 2014, told Huffington Post U.K. that Trump sent him many letters criticizing the Scottish government’s support of an offshore wind project planned near Trump International Golf Links.

Huffington Post U.K. filed a public records request for the letters, and what they got back is a doozy. Some of the letters object to the project on the grounds that offshore wind is bad technology (one letter includes an analysis from the Institute for Energy Research, a Koch-backed fossil fuel front group).

Just as clear is a feeling of aesthetic panic. In the same way that Trump has a fear of insufficiently attractive women waiting tables at Trump-branded golf courses, he seems to have a primal objection to just looking at windmills.

“Hopefully,” he writes in one letter. “Aberdeen’s coastline will not be destroyed by these monsters.” In another: “Do you want to be known as ‘Mad Alex’ – the man who destroyed Scotland?” he asks Salmond.

Anthony Levandowski, head of Uber’s autonomous vehicle program, said the company has no plans to stop testing cars in San Francisco even though it’s illegal. Uber is not one of the 20 companies approved by the state to test self-driving cars on public roads. “It’s an important issue of principle,” Levandowski said.

Humans too struggle with right turns and bike lanes. Cities that put a priority on safe cycling alter intersections to make right-hook turns difficult if not impossible. The Dutch do it with concrete barriers …

]]>self driving car uberright-turn-sfbcdutch-bicycle-intersectionbike-box-nactoGoogle’s self-driving car project is now a company named Waymo.https://grist.org/briefly/googles-self-driving-car-project-is-now-a-company-named-waymo/
Wed, 14 Dec 2016 16:40:10 +0000http://grist.org/?post_type=news-brief&p=358088That name stands for “a new way forward in mobility,” not “we’re making way mo’ cars that will drive themselves around while your grandparents make out inside.”

Anyone viewing this heartwarming brand identity video, though, can see that the latter is clearly part of the mission objective.

The video also features a first: Steve Mahan, a legally blind man, rides around a residential neighborhood in Austin, Texas, in a Google car with no pedals or steering wheel — the first member of the public to make such a trip alone on public roads. That trip was taken in October 2015, a year before Otto, Uber’s self-driving truck company, made its historic autonomous beer delivery in Colorado.

Like Otto, Waymo plans to license its self-driving technology to automakers and trucking companies, rather than try to manufacture the cute cars featured in the promo video. Its first licensing deal is for 100 Fiat Chrysler minivans, but they’ll be for testing only and won’t be sold to the public.

On Tuesday, Waymo Chief Executive John Krafcik declined to speculate on how quickly self-driving cars will spread, but said, “we are close to bringing this to a lot of people.”

This is step one in delivering on promises made last year during the Paris climate talks. Gates pledged at that time to invest $1 billion of his own money in clean energy technology over the next five years. And the Breakthrough Energy Coalition — an international group of tech and finance bigshots that includes Gates, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Virgin mogul Richard Branson, Alibaba founder Jack Ma, and investor and beach-hoarder Vinod Khosla — also pledged to invest in early-stage clean technologies.

]]>Bill Gates, co-chair and trustee of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation speaks during the Clinton Global Initiative's annual meeting in New YorkThirty-three states (and D.C.) are cutting CO2 all the way to the bank.https://grist.org/briefly/thirty-three-states-and-d-c-are-cutting-co2-all-the-way-to-the-bank/
Fri, 09 Dec 2016 22:27:43 +0000http://grist.org/?post_type=news-brief&p=357726That’s according to a new report from the Brookings Institution, which says a decoupling of economic growth from CO2 emissions shows that it is indeed possible to have your cake (aka money) and eat it too (aka less pollution).
Brookings Institute

As Brookings put it: “President-elect Trump’s notion of an opposition between economic growth and environmental stewardship appears to be a false one.”

On average, the states that separated economic growth from emissions saw their GDPs rise by 22 percent while cutting CO2 by 12 percent between 2000 and 2014. States where emissions rose saw GDP rise too, by an average of 32 percent, but that figure might have been lower if Brookings had been able to analyze more recent data, as oil, gas, and coal prices have fallen in the last couple of years, hurting the economies of fossil fuel–producing states.

Going forward, all states need to do better — national emissions must drop 4.3 percent a year from now till 2030 to be on track to avert the worst of global warming. The good news is that even if the federal government isn’t helping, states and cities have a lot of power to cut carbon via renewable energy targets, energy-efficiency efforts, building codes, and more.

]]>sunnysmokestakcsus-decoupling-emissions-gdpThe Ghost Ship fire is a reminder: We have to make our cities work for everyonehttps://grist.org/cities/the-ghost-ship-fire-is-a-reminder-we-have-to-make-our-cities-work-for-everyone/
Thu, 08 Dec 2016 21:15:06 +0000http://grist.org/?p=357583

Over a decade ago, a friend of mine moved into a warehouse in Oakland. The first time I saw it, the warehouse was an echoing, cavernous space, empty except for a few lonely trucks parked inside and a 1950s office chair rigged up so that it hung like a chandelier from the ceiling-mounted crane system. You could use the crane controls to hoist the chair into the air, with yourself sitting in it, and zip back and forth across the warehouse with alarming speed. Which I did. “Truly,” I thought, “This is what Oprah meant when she said, ‘Live your best life.’”

Soon, the warehouse was filled with shipping containers stacked on top of each other, and the containers were filled with thrifted furniture, tool benches, and, in one case, a full kitchen, although I think most residents lived off takeout and microwave dinners.

Outside, the neighborhood felt empty — just rows of blank industrial buildings, gated condominium complexes, and big box stores. The warehomes, though, were their own small cities filled with drama and romance and gossip and art (mostly bad, sometimes good). The days when a young, broke person could rent in a walkable neighborhood with things like parks and porches were long gone, so the warehouses became people’s neighborhoods.

Our cities, which emptied out in the ’50s and ’60s, are turning back into densely populated metropolises. That’s good. But the ever-widening income gap in this country is pushing people at the bottom end of the income spectrum into the kind of risky living situations that haven’t been common since the tenement era. If we’re all going to be able to live in the city together, we’re going to have to accept unconventional housing and work to make it safer.

So far, the response to the Ghost Ship fire has been a wave of evictions, in Oakland and elsewhere. But just because the Ghost Ship building was dangerous doesn’t mean all other such buildings are. Several partygoers, former tenants, and neighbors had reported the building as unsafe or a fire hazard, but officials took no action. (Oakland has just six fire inspectors who are responsible for investigating more than 4,200 commercial and residential properties each year, and they’re focused on collecting as many fire inspection fees as possible, rather than carrying out detailed inspections — or so the firefighter’s union told Oakland Magazine.)

The warehouse that my friend lived in in Oakland had a few fires — the place was home to plenty of easily distractible people, welding equipment, and at least one remote-controlled robot with a flamethrower. What finally ended things was the candlelight photographer — she wandered off from a photo session in her shipping container, forgetting she’d left a candle burning. No one realized that her container was on fire until the ceiling caved in from the heat inside. The people in the building emptied out every fire extinguisher they had onto the container, knowing that if they called the fire department that would be the end of living there. And it was. When the firefighters arrived, they said a) this place is awesome and b) you know we’ve got to shut it down.

But back then, and even more so now, people living in warehouses were much more worried about eviction than about fire hazards. They did their best to stay safe under the constraints of the reality that they lived in, without involving any authority figures. “Friends don’t let friends build with pallet wood,” one of them told me. Another had a rule about never turning on the tempestuous industrial gas heater, which periodically shot sparks into the air, unless you were in the same room with it, watching it with both eyes.

It’s a mistake to assume that the lack of government oversight of the Ghost Ship is unique to the bohemian warehouse-dwelling scene. Last year, in San Francisco’s Mission District, an old three-story apartment and office building was destroyed by a four-alarm fire that killed one person, severely burned another, and left some 40 people without a place to live in the middle of a housing crisis. The building was worth millions, but it had no sprinkler system, bad electrical wiring, and fire alarms that, tenants said, never went off.

San Francisco had gotten so distracted with newness — new tech, new housing, new bike lanes, new ways of crunching city data — that somehow it had forgotten one of the most essential functions of city government: Don’t let the city catch on fire.

The fire escape outside my apartment window is a reminder that, in the wake of the horrific tenement fires of the late 18th century, the cities of the past figured out how to become safer places. We can do this too. It starts with making sure that residents of dangerous buildings can report safety concerns without worrying that they will lose their homes.

]]>oakland-fire-reuters-cThe first offshore wind farm in the U.S. is about to go online, despite a malfunctioning turbine.https://grist.org/briefly/the-first-offshore-wind-farm-in-the-u-s-is-about-to-go-online-despite-a-malfunctioning-turbine/
Tue, 06 Dec 2016 23:22:51 +0000http://grist.org/?post_type=news-brief&p=357159One of the five newly installed turbines off the shore of Block Island, Rhode Island, will be late getting spinning because someone at the General Electric factory in Saint-Nazaire, France, left a six-inch drill bit inside it, which damaged critical magnets.

Fortunately, the turbine is still under warranty, so it’s GE’s responsibility to pay for floating new 60-pound magnets out to the broken turbine, hoisting them 330 feet into the air, and repairing the turbine’s generator.

Block Island has been getting its electricity from diesel generators, but now it will be able to ditch them (except for one it’ll keep for backup). Three other offshore wind projects in the region are already in the works.

]]>block-island-deepwater-windCould we be heading into a mortgage crisis, but with cars?https://grist.org/briefly/could-we-be-heading-into-a-mortgage-crisis-but-with-cars/
Mon, 05 Dec 2016 23:14:43 +0000http://grist.org/?post_type=news-brief&p=356994The Federal Reserve Bank of New York thinks so. It released new figures last week showing that the percentage of delinquent subprime auto loans in the U.S. has reached its highest level since 2010: 6 million people who are more than 90 days late on their car payments.

If we invested more in public transit systems and housing near transit hubs, many people wouldn’t need cars or car loans. But instead we’re looking at Trump’s proposed infrastructure plan, which would likely add to drivers’ burdens by creating more toll roads.

This points to a significant fault line in the GOP: It’s financially dominated by fossil fuel oligarchs (who will now have a major say in the Trump administration), but it’s also filled with people who think that renewable energy is about as conservative as you can get. And that suggests there are ripe opportunities for bipartisan cooperation on clean power — especially in states where it can provide a big boost to the economy.

Amendment 1, a deceptive ballot initiative drawn up by utilities, appeared to be friendly to rooftop solar efforts, but actually would have quashed them. It needed 60 percent of the vote to pass, and in September it was polling at 84 percent. But a politically diverse grassroots coalition of solar backers fought hard to get the truth out and beat back the measure, and ultimately they succeeded: Only 50.8 percent of Floridians voted in favor and 49.2 percent voted against, so Amendment 1 died. Several counties that went overwhelmingly for Trump — like Collier, Lee, and Sarasota — rejected Amendment 1 by a wide margin. That reflects a nationwide trend, as a recent survey by a Republican polling firm found that 75 percent of Trump voters support “action to accelerate the deployment and use of clean energy.”

Florida has been known as the “sleeping giant” in the solar industry. It’s filled with big, juicy suburban roofs perched atop homes with big, juicy air-conditioning bills. Only California and Texas have more housing units. But because of state policies that have discouraged rooftop solar, Florida lags far behind other states in the number of solar installations.

Activists across the political spectrum have been pushing to change those policies and open the state up to solar power in recent years, and utilities and Koch-backed corporate groups have been pushing back. Amendment 1, as Grist reported before the election, was a big part of that pushback effort. That it lost is very good news for renewable energy in Florida. In fact, less than a month after Amendment 1 went down, SolarCity, the largest solar panel installer in the U.S., announced that it was moving into Florida’s residential market.

Here’s what clean power advocates across the U.S. can learn from Florida’s solar fight:

Lesson 1: Conservatives can be big clean energy boosters — if you sell it right

Many conservatives are downright enthusiastic about renewable energy, says David Pomerantz, executive director of the Energy and Policy Institute, a watchdog organization that investigates attacks on clean energy policies. Tea Party activists were some of the most influential members of Floridians for Solar Choice, the coalition that fought to defeat Amendment 1.

Tory Perfetti, the Florida director of Conservatives for Energy Freedom and chair of Floridians for Solar Choice, says conversation and compromise are essential when working across party lines to promote clean energy. “You need to talk with people with a very calm mind,” Perfetti says. “Not an open mind. A calm one. You listen to everybody’s individual issues, and you don’t violate people’s individual and specific concerns. It says something that in over two years we have not lost one member of FSC. ”

The coalition had to do some deft linguistic maneuvering to come up with a single handout on Amendment 1 that could be given out to any Floridian, regardless of political affiliation.

“We had to work in a smart way, and not set up subtle trip wires that were turning people off,” says Stephen Smith, director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy. “Some conservatives don’t like the word ‘sustainable’ because they associated it with the United Nations. They wanted to use the word ‘rigged’ at the same time that Trump was running around saying that the election was rigged. But the League of Women Voters didn’t want to use that word and give it any more power.”

The coalition’s Facebook page was also a powder keg that needed to be constantly defused. “When Jimmy Buffett endorsed No on Amendment 1, people started writing ‘I hate Jimmy Buffett’ all over our Facebook page, because Buffett was a Hillary supporter,” Smith says. “We had to delete so much.”

Lesson 2: Sometimes it’s not helpful to mention climate change

Coalition members decided there was a time and place to talk about climate change in relation to Amendment 1. And that was when they were handing out fliers at a Clinton rally, Smith says — not when the coalition was writing the flier itself.

“I think that climate change is becoming acceptable in South Florida,” Smith says. “They’re increasingly aware of the vulnerability of the Everglades and Miami. I just don’t believe the whole state of Florida has come to that realization yet.”

Indeed, although 66 percent of Florida voters polled on Election Day said climate change is a serious problem, 87 percent of the Floridians who voted for Trump disagreed.

Focusing on other benefits of clean energy — like the jobs that a booming rooftop solar industry would bring to the state, and the chance that solar could lower utility bills — attracted much more support.

Lesson 3: It’s good to have a common enemy

Utility companies turned out to be a perfect villain in the Amendment 1 fight. They were already unpopular in Florida for raising rates, so citizens were receptive to the argument that utilities were misleading voters and trying to protect their monopoly markets.

It also helps when you catch your villain, Nixon-like, talking about misdeeds on tape. In October, the Energy and Policy Institute and Center for Media and Democracy obtained a recording of Sal Nuzzo, a vice president at the Koch-funded James Madison Institute, bragging to a group of think tanks about the “savvy maneuver” used by Amendment 1’s backers to confuse voters. Nuzzo recommended that other groups use “a little bit of political jiu-jitsu and the language of promoting solar” to accomplish their own political goals.

“The leaked audiotape just reinforced what we were saying,” Smith says. “But we had been pouring gas all over the state, and that was the spark.”

Lesson 4: Be nimble enough to change course when needed

The coalition went into this year thinking that it was going to be promoting pro-solar measures. It got a minor one approved on the August primary ballot. Meanwhile, it was putting most of its energy behind a more aggressive ballot measure that would limit the barriers utilities could throw up in the way of people who want to put solar panels on their roofs. The coalition started trying to gather the 683,000 signatures needed to get that proposal on the ballot.

But then the utilities responded by crafting their own ballot initiative, Amendment 1, which, despite its deceptively pro-solar language, would amend the state constitution to make it harder for people to put solar on their roofs. Utilities and their allies threw a vast amount of money at paid signature gatherers and successfully confused many state residents about which ballot measure was actually pro-solar.

In order to have the resources to fight Amendment 1, the coalition had to let its own ballot initiative die. Instead of playing offense, the coalition had to play defense.

It wasn’t the path the coalition had envisioned, but by successfully fighting off the utilities and demonstrating that Floridians want more solar power, the activists have laid the groundwork for more proactive campaigns in the future.

Lesson 5: Grassroots organizing can beat big money

Utilities spent $20 million trying to pass Amendment 1. In contrast, the coalition, after it began fighting Amendment 1 in earnest in September, was working with monetary donations of roughly $92,500 and in-kind donations of $220,300, says Jennifer Rennicks of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy.

“Many people rely on overpowering opponents with massive amounts of cash,” Perfetti says. “And this was the second most expensive ballot campaign in the history of Florida.”

“But we did the politics as local, the way that old-school campaigns did years ago. Every media outlet. Every meeting. Every Rotary and Chamber of Commerce. We ran a grassroots campaign the way that it should be run.”

]]>https://grist.org/climate-energy/5-lessons-activists-can-learn-from-floridas-successful-ballot-fight-to-defend-solar/feed/3florida votingTrump is still ranting against a wind farm being built near his Scottish golf course.https://grist.org/briefly/trump-is-still-ranting-against-a-wind-farm-being-built-near-his-scottish-golf-course/
Tue, 22 Nov 2016 22:09:31 +0000http://grist.org/?post_type=news-brief&p=355959It’s yet another indication that he has no qualms at all about mixing politics and business.

In Trump’s first post-election meeting with a British politician — Nigel Farage, a right-winger who led the Brexit campaign — the president-elect complained about wind farms and encouraged Farage and his entourage to fight them.

“Mr. Trump kept returning to … the issue of wind farms,” said Andy Wigmore, a former Brexit communications chief who was also in attendance. He “absolutely adores Scotland, which he thinks is one of the most beautiful places on Earth. But he is dismayed that his beloved Scotland has become over-run with ugly wind farms which he believes are a blight on the stunning landscape.”

Astute readers will remember that Trump has a long-running feud with a company that plans to build an offshore wind farm near a luxury golf course that he owns in Scotland.

]]>trump-golf-cA woman who fought predatory oil and gas leasing on Native lands got the Presidential Medal of Honor.https://grist.org/briefly/a-woman-who-fought-predatory-oil-and-gas-leasing-on-native-lands-got-the-presidential-medal-of-honor/
Thu, 17 Nov 2016 20:13:42 +0000http://grist.org/?post_type=news-brief&p=355448It’s not often that the highest civilian honor in America goes to an accountant, but Elouise Cobell was no ordinary accountant.

The Blackfeet knew what was up. The land was being leased out by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Department of the Interior, and the money never made it back to the reservation. Cobell learned accounting and banking, which ultimately led her to file a landmark, 15-year-long lawsuit. When it was over, the Department of the Interior agreed to pay $3.4 billion to compensate for decades of lost revenue and to purchase land that had been split up so that it could be returned whole to the tribes.

The process of freeing Blackfeet land from oil and gas leases continues today. The Department of the Interior announced a settlement with one of the last companies holding a lease to Badger-Two Medicine, the site of many Blackfeet creation stories.

Cobell died in 2011, but the ideals that motivated her live on, most visibly at Standing Rock.

]]>obama-elouise-coubellYoung tech entrepreneur takes the money Peter Thiel gave him, donates it to climate fight.https://grist.org/briefly/young-tech-entrepreneur-takes-the-money-peter-thiel-gave-him-donates-it-to-climate-fight/
Fri, 11 Nov 2016 21:41:53 +0000http://grist.org/?post_type=news-brief&p=355042Thiel is a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and a libertarian. For the last five years, the Paypal founder has been giving $100,000 fellowships to a select group of people under the age of 21, with the conditions that they drop out of school and start a company instead.

But in the wake of Thiel’s appointment as a member of Donald Trump’s transition team, one Thiel fellow, Cosmo Scharf, announced he’s quitting: “I’m turning down the rest of the grant that I haven’t received yet — which is a LOT of money — and donating what I have already received to a charity or project related to climate change because our planet is about to get wrecked.”

Then, being a virtual reality entrepreneur, he makes a pitch for VR as something we need “now more than ever” to help people understand each other.

This isn’t the first time that Silicon Valley has disagreed over climate action. In 2013, Elon Musk left Fwd.us, a political action committee created by Mark Zuckerberg, over its support of the Keystone pipeline, and oil drilling in Alaska. Big players like Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook have adopted a conciliatory tone post-election, but this may be a sign of tensions to come.

]]>peter-thielCloud spy cams could make solar panels work better.https://grist.org/briefly/cloud-spy-cams-could-make-solar-panels-work-better/
Fri, 11 Nov 2016 21:08:55 +0000http://grist.org/?post_type=news-brief&p=354914It’s a familiar refrain — the sun doesn’t always shine, so how can we depend on solar? And there are issues with solar over- or underwhelming electrical grids.

One company has a very James Bond solution to fight back against one of solar’s biggest enemies, clouds. Fulcrum 3D, an Australian tech company, uses a CloudCAM network of cameras to scan the sky around a solar installation and identify which clouds on the horizon look like potential visitors. Once identified, the system can adapt to the coming energy shortage (or glut).

It’s unclear whether cloud spyware will prove to be a big thing beyond its initial deployment at a solar farm at the Karratha airport. Still, just check out this list of “challenging cloud events” that CloudCAM can handle: spontaneous cloud formation; cloud shrinkage and disappearance; multi-level cloud, including clouds moving in different directions; cloud disappearance and emergence.

]]>clouds.jpgClean technology will move forward despite a Trump administration.https://grist.org/briefly/clean-technology-will-move-forward-despite-a-trump-administration/
Thu, 10 Nov 2016 18:29:20 +0000http://grist.org/?post_type=news-brief&p=354849The morning after the election, solar and wind stocks weren’t looking great, and the stocks of a bankrupt coal company were on the rise. Trump promises to resuscitate coal and scrap the Clean Power Plan.

When oil prices go up, so will renewable energy profits. Saudi Arabia flooded the market with cheap oil to kneecap the shale oil boom and annoy Russia. This geopolitical bonanza is about to end, and it’ll be terrible for America’s water supply, because it’ll make fracking lucrative again. But higher oil prices also make renewable energy into a more lucrative investment, to the point where they could beat fossil fuels in the marketplace without government support.

World moves forward on cleantech. Last year, 196 countries pledged trillions to moving off fossil fuels. If Trump follows through on his promise to stymie U.S. participation, that’s America’s loss, because those 195 countries are all potential customers of (and investors in) U.S. technology. Other countries have their own research universities and venture capital. They’ll design better wind turbines and smart grids, and happily sell them to each other.

As Ceres President Mindy Lubber said: “The world [is] moving forward, with or without us.”

]]>solar wind energyNow you can use Google to organize your neighbors around solar.https://grist.org/briefly/now-you-can-use-google-to-organize-your-neighbors-around-solar/
Fri, 04 Nov 2016 19:32:06 +0000http://grist.org/?post_type=news-brief&p=354295You may remember Google’s Project Sunroof, a website that uses maps, weather records, and a database of local laws and tax incentives to create, basically, Google Maps for solar. You just type in your address and, voilà, you can see exactly how suitable your roof is for solar.

Well, Project Sunroof just launched a new data explorer tool with real political potential — one that crunches solar feasibility data for an entire zip code. Interested in setting up a community solar project? Want to show your city council just how much energy the city could produce if they streamlined solar permitting? Picking a neighborhood for your solar-powered survivalist commune? Google’s got you covered.

Seriously — this is a cool development. For a long time, there was so little public discussion of climate change that it seemed like it could only be tackled on an individual basis. Public tools like this are a sign of how the culture is changing.

]]>project-sunroofCan California get anyone other than rich people to buy electric vehicles?https://grist.org/briefly/can-california-get-anyone-other-than-rich-people-to-buy-electric-vehicles/
Thu, 03 Nov 2016 19:39:51 +0000http://grist.org/?post_type=news-brief&p=354052The state government is now trying to answer that question.

California has a generous EV rebate program, which pays out $900 to $5,000 in cash to anyone who buys one. But most of that money has been going to well-to-do people, as 75 percent of EV buyers in the state make at least $100,000 a year.

Maybe that was fine when the state was just trying to kick-start the EV market, but now it’s aiming to get 1.5 million EVs on the roads by 2025, up from about 240,000 now, and it can’t do it if only the wealthy participate. Plus, one of the key benefits of EVs is that they improve local air quality, which is needed a lot more in poor neighborhoods than rich ones.

So, under rules that took effect this week, rebates will now only go to Californians making under $150,000. And people making under $35,640 (or $72,900 for a family of four) will get an extra $2,000. The state is also experimenting with a pilot program to help low-income people get loans to buy electric cars, both new and used.

These changes won’t do it alone. Access to charging stations, for example, is going to be critical. Still, this is a step in the right direction.

]]>oil pump fossil fuelsHave the Koch brothers jumped the shark?https://grist.org/briefly/have-the-koch-brothers-jumped-the-shark/
Thu, 27 Oct 2016 19:38:55 +0000http://grist.org/?post_type=news-brief&p=353328Or are they just holed up, binging on Netflix, and waiting for this whole Trump thing to be over?

Politico interviewed several Koch insiders about how the duo’s political operation, which once seemed to rival the Republican Party, is now in retreat, having lost some big-money donors like Sheldon Adelson. In mid-September, a top Koch official told some 200 employees that the network was scaling back its efforts to make America into a libertarian utopia, because it didn’t seem to be actually working.

Apparently the Tea Party, which sprang from an ocean of Koch money, proved difficult to control once created. “We were not able to educate many in the tea party more about how the process works and how free markets work,” a Koch donor told Politico. “Seeing this movement that we were part of creating going off in a direction that’s anti-free-market, anti-trade and anti-immigrant — many of us are really saddened by that.”

The Koch family fortune depends on weak environmental regulations and generous tax breaks, so it’s hard to imagine that the brothers will retreat from political life for long. But these current struggles are a heartwarming reminder that sometimes you really can’t buy the politics you want.

The video commemorating the event is an engagingly shameless piece of co-branding between Budweiser and the self-driving truck startup that was purchased by Uber in August. “We knew we wanted an iconic American brand that was passionate about their products,” says Otto co-founder Anthony Levandowski in a voiceover, as dramatic beer-can-factory footage gives way to swooping drone shots of the truck steering itself down I-25. “Budweiser was a perfect partner.”

The truck driver, Walter Martin, sits serenely in the passenger seat, reading what appears to be a Patagonia catalogue. The future is now!

It’s only the “delivery” part that is a milestone here. Vehicles have been steering autonomously on highways for nearly two decades now.

The major challenge of autonomous driving is what happens when you leave the relative simplicity of the highway for the chaos of urban traffic.

So, take this news with a grain of salt, but do enjoy that country guitar soundtrack. And try not to think of the irony of a technology that could replace so many blue-collar jobs being used to deliver the ultimate blue-collar beer.

But then, what to do with the news last week that a robo-mob of clever internet-enabled gadgets was hijacked and used to temporarily bring down many of the most popular websites in the United States? Could our smart thermostats go rogue and help take out the internet?

It doesn’t look like internet-connected energy-saving devices were affected by the cyberattack, experts say. So this attack is not a reason to avoid buying or using them. It is, though, a reminder to make sure all of your smart devices are protected by top-notch security.

Here’s what you need to know:

What was the deal with this attack?

The Internet of Things — or IoT, for short — consists of more than 6 billion devices connected to the internet: security cameras, Fitbits, learning thermostats, what have you. Last week, hackers used malware named Mirai to create a botnet gang of several hundred thousand of these gadgets and attack Dyn, one of a handful of companies that direct traffic across the internet. An estimated 1,200 websites, including Twitter, Reddit, and the New York Times, didn’t so much go down as become impossible to find, because Dyn was too flooded with meaningless requests from Mirai’s zombie bot army to help real humans get where they were trying to go.

Here’s how Justine Bone, CEO of MedSec, which studies security in internet-enabled medical devices, described the IoT security challenge to me: When you have a bad chip in your high-tech toaster, there’s not too much that can go wrong. Maybe you get some bad toast out of it. Maybe it catches on fire. But when a whole series of badly designed devices are connected to the internet, that can make everyone miserable, not just toast eaters. “An army of toasters can cause trouble,” she said.

You’re sure my thermostat wasn’t involved?

Yes. Here’s how we know: Brian Krebs, a former reporter for the Washington Post who now runs his own site on computer security, became an involuntary expert in Mirai when someone used it to attack his site in September. Attacks like this are fairly common (they’re called distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attacks), but the size of the one on his site attracted some attention. Akamai, the company that keeps Krebs’ site running, claimed at the time that it was one of the largest botnet attacks in the history of the internet.

A few weeks after the attack on Krebs, the source code for Mirai was publicly released onto the internet, probably to confuse any law enforcement agencies trying to trace the program back to its source. The code revealed that Mirai works by constantly scanning the internet for IoT gadgets with usernames and passwords that are still set to the factory defaults. Mirai then uses those passwords to make itself administrator of the devices.

Craig Young, a security researcher with Tripwire, told Consumer Reports, “I would be confident in saying that most popular IoT devices have not been exposed to the Mirai threat — thermostats, fridges, name-brand cameras, smart outlets, and lighting.”

Thermostat company Nest, perhaps the most well-known maker of smart home energy-saving gadgets, believes none of its products were affected: “To our knowledge, no Nest device has been involved in any of the recent attacks,” it said in a statement.

So what devices were hijacked?

Last week’s attack primarily involved security cameras and digital video recorders being used for surveillance.

The hackers who write botnet software are looking for the low-hanging fruit — usernames and passwords that will let them unlock as many devices as possible. So they targeted products from a handful of companies that make low-cost electronics in high volume, and with terrible security features.

Most consumers who buy easily hackable devices aren’t thinking about internet security — in part because DDoS attacks and the like target public websites rather than individuals. “People just plug in these things and forget about them,” Krebs said when I called him to ask about the latest attack.

“People want to blame the Russians or something, but there’s lots of blame to go around,” Krebs continued. “This is a case of some companies wanting to own this market and dumping cheap hardware and flimsy software. The IoT storm has been a decade in the making, and now it’s happening. The longer we ignore it, the harder it is to fix.”

Many of the insecure devices hijacked last week contain hardware manufactured by Chinese company XiongMai Technologies. When word got out about this, XiongMai announced that it had tightened its security standards and was recalling millions of cameras — even as it threatened legal action against media outlets that it said were issuing “false statements” about the company.

How can I make sure my smart gadgets are protected going forward?

Figuring out how secure your devices are can be tricky, but it’s important — not just to make sure you don’t facilitate DDoS attacks, but to protect your personal data and ensure that you’re the one controlling the heating, lighting, etc., in your home.

A device with good security will require you to come up with a new username and password before you connect it to the internet. A device with not-so-great security will make it possible to change the factory default username and password. A device with terrible security will come with a factory-installed username and password that you can’t change, making it a sitting duck for any program crawling the web and looking for machines that can be turned into zombie minions.

If you’re going to connect something to the internet, go with a brand that emphasizes its attention to security. Companies that are trying to establish or maintain a reputation for security will be much more motivated to patch a security hole than companies that don’t mention security at all.

Smart thermostat makers Nest, Ecobee, and Tado have security information clearly posted on their websites. Nest goes even further; it’s owned by Google, which offers a reward to anyone who can find a security hole in the system. In contrast, thermostat manufacturer Trane, whose various past security holes are described in this blog post, does not highlight security on its website.

“At the end of the day, security is just a symptom of the quality of the product,” said Bone. “If a product is badly designed, that will flow through to mistakes in the underlying software.”

Going for a cheap, off-brand model is not a good idea. “Basically, you get what you pay for,” said Krebs.

What’s the solution to all this poor security?

As security expert Bruce Schneier put it after the attack on Krebs, “the economics of the IoT mean that it will remain insecure unless government steps in to fix the problem. This is a market failure that can’t get fixed on its own.”

The owners of the security cameras that are being used to attack the internet don’t know that their devices have been taken over. Meanwhile, the manufacturers are busy trying to sell new models, instead of patching up old ones. “There is no market solution,” Schneier concludes, “because the insecurity is what economists call an externality: it’s an effect of the purchasing decision that affects other people. Think of it kind of like invisible pollution.”

But neither Bone nor Krebs have faith that governments will effectively regulate the Internet of Things, especially given the hot mess that is international trade. More than anything, they think it will be the fear of losing customers that will motivate companies to tighten up their security.

So, do I even want to be a part of this Internet of Things?

Well, you’re reading this on the internet, so you’re already partway there. If you like gadgets, don’t be frightened off from buying smart devices as long as they’re from reputable and well-reviewed companies.

On the other hand, if you think gadgets are overrated, you can feel smug in knowing that there are plenty of low-tech ways to conserve energy.

]]>smart-home-shutterstock-cI went and made all new Teslas autonomous, says Elon Musk. You’re welcome.https://grist.org/briefly/i-went-and-made-all-new-teslas-autonomous-says-elon-musk-youre-welcome/
Thu, 20 Oct 2016 20:04:04 +0000http://grist.org/?post_type=news-brief&p=352771As of yesterday, all new cars rolling off the Tesla factory line come with full self-driving hardware. That includes the Model 3, which, at $35,000, is the closest Tesla gets to a budget car.

That doesn’t mean your Tesla will drive itself out of the showroom. Even standard safety features like automatic emergency braking and active cruise control will be disabled until Tesla completes more real-world testing and rolls out the software to turn the new hardware on.

What is this hardware? The car comes with eight cameras, 12 ultrasonic sensors, and radar. The radar is a fail-safe for the cameras — when they’re confused by rain, snow, or the angle of the sun, radar can usually tell there’s something ahead. Or, as Tesla puts it, “the car should almost always hit the brakes correctly even if a UFO were to land on the freeway in zero visibility conditions.”

In a post on Tesla’s website, this new set-up is described as everything necessary “for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver.” Keep in mind that there’s no scientific definition of what that is yet. We’ll have to take Tesla’s word for it.

]]>Tesla_factoryOil companies should be scared of electric vehicles.https://grist.org/briefly/oil-companies-should-be-scared-of-electric-vehicles/
Wed, 19 Oct 2016 19:42:43 +0000http://grist.org/?post_type=news-brief&p=352566So says a report released this week by the Fitch credit rating agency. Rapid innovation in batteries could trigger an “investor death spiral” in which spooked owners of oil stocks sell them off, and loans and credit for new oil projects become hard to obtain. Wise oil companies will diversify now and invest in batteries and renewables, the report says.

Electric cars are a particular threat, according to Fitch, because transportation is a huge user of oil — it accounted for about 55 percent of total oil use in 2014. But a leap forward in batteries would also hit utilities hard, since it would eliminate the need to keep coal and natural gas plants running in order to balance the intermittent electricity generated by wind and solar installations.

The report is the first in a series that Fitch is doing on how rapid technological improvement could disrupt business as usual. It’s outlining a long-term scenario rather than making predictions.

Still, serious disruption could happen even without technological breakthroughs. “One of the most difficult things for oil companies,” the report’s lead author, Alex Griffiths, told the Financial Times, “would be if China decides, ‘Actually we don’t want petrol cars in five years’ time.'”

]]>electric vehiclesApple is having second thoughts about building electric, self-driving cars.https://grist.org/briefly/apple-is-having-second-thoughts-about-building-electric-self-driving-cars/
Mon, 17 Oct 2016 21:54:45 +0000http://grist.org/?post_type=news-brief&p=352295The company is reportedly focusing instead on developing software for driverless vehicles that could be used by other car companies.

The shift has led to a mass exodus at Apple’s secretive car division, Project Titan, anonymous sources tell Bloomberg News. Hundreds of people from the once-1,000-person-strong team have either been reassigned to other divisions, been let go, or quit, though some new people have also been added.

In 2008, after Apple released the iPhone, Steve Jobs talked with Tony Fadell, a senior VP at Apple, about taking on a car as the company’s next game-changer, and redesigning it from scratch. “What would a dashboard be?” Fadell said, describing one conversation. “What would seats be? How would you fuel it or power it?”

But those big dreams seem to have hit hard realities. Among other things, Apple had trouble getting suppliers to make small quantities of parts, Bloomberg reports. Ultimately, it’s very difficult for a company to get into the car manufacturing business — even an established tech behemoth. And for those of us who’d like to see more innovation in the transportation sector, that’s too bad.

]]>apple carSometimes you have to melt some ice to make a point.https://grist.org/briefly/sometimes-you-have-to-melt-some-ice-to-make-a-point/
Fri, 14 Oct 2016 17:40:29 +0000http://grist.org/?post_type=news-brief&p=352044The art collective Futures North just won the Art + Interaction prize at SXSW Eco for Phase Change, a project that combined pre-industrial ice harvesting techniques with 21st-century computer modeling to create a physical model of a changing climate.

Here’s how it worked: Futures North cut blocks of ice from a Minnesota lake during the dead of winter and stored them in an old-fashioned ice house.

When June rolled around, the team stacked the ice blocks under a lattice of infrared lights programmed to turn on and off based on three climate scenarios: one where the industrial era never happened; one based on today’s climate; and one future based on the most disastrous forecasts.

Less visible was how climate change put every step of the project in doubt. “It was such a warm winter that we weren’t even sure if the ice would be thick enough,” said Molly Reichert, one of the project’s leads. “It was such a warm spring, weren’t sure if there would be any ice by June.”

Visitors got to take bottles of meltwater home. “It’s beautiful,” one visitor said, “to see such a tragic thing come to life.”